A hundred and twenty years on the same ground

The two farms

The front place is the Paulsen farm, right along Interstate 80. The family moved onto it in 1905, which makes it an Iowa Century Farm, and it has been worked by Paulsens ever since.

The back place is the Nelson farm. It belonged to Alex's grandma Janet, who was a teenager when her family took it on. She is 93 now, so that ground has been in the family somewhere close to eighty years. It is not quite a Century Farm, but it is a heritage farm by any honest measure.

We plan to move out to the back farm and build the operation there: rain capture, canning storage, a wood stove for backup heat, a smokehouse. That is the long project. Production can happen on either place in the meantime.

Why we are doing this

The farm side, at its base level, is food production. Clean, regenerative, healthy food. Whether it is a cut green or a chicken, what matters is that people can trust it does not have a bunch of junk in it, and that raising it helped the land instead of taking from it. Keeping topsoil rather than losing it.

The floral side is a different feeling on purpose. That one is the joy of flowers. It is beauty. Same family, same ground, different reason to care.

They are two sides of one brand for now. Maybe someday they formally split. Right now they are joined, because they come from the same place and the same two people.

Sovereignty, which is the part Alex will talk your ear off about

There is a bigger reason under all of it, and it is worth saying plainly. All wealth bottoms out in food and water. If you have any interest in real wealth, you need some handle on those two things. Look at how much of the trouble in our food system tracks the trouble in our financial system.

The good news is that you can reclaim a surprising amount of that just by making a few decisions. Maybe you get a deep freeze and you put ten chickens in it from a farmer down the road. You plan for it, you prioritize it, and now you have some food security and a different relationship with the grocery store.

You do not have to farm to start. Everybody can put an herb box on a windowsill, cook with it, and have a little more say over what they interact with than they had before. Small steps like that add up, and they change how you think. There is nothing more intimate than what you put in your body. It becomes you.

We are not out to feed the world. We are growing food for the people around us who like us, and who we like.

What actually makes us different

There is the Century Farm. There is the regenerative approach, and there are plenty of kindred spirits doing that work across Iowa. But the honest answer is smaller than either of those, and it is the same answer Alex would give about the coffee business he ran before this one, a cart and a kiosk he took around Siouxland for a few years.

There are a lot of places to buy coffee. It came down to whether people liked us. We treat people well, we care about quality and about health, and we care about the community we are selling into. That is the whole differentiator, and it is not a small one.

Bronte's floral work came up through Des Moines design studios before it came home to the farm, which is why the flower side of this is a real trade rather than a hobby that got out of hand.

Where we are

We are near Atlantic, in Cass County, southwest Iowa. Council Bluffs and Omaha are about fifty five minutes west. Most of Des Moines is about an hour east. Interstate 80 runs past the front farm.

Sitting halfway between two metros on the interstate is unusual for a farm this size, and it shapes what we can do. It puts a lot of people within an easy drive of us, and it puts us within an easy drive of a lot of markets.

Where this goes

Year one is deliberately small: chicken by the batch to a short list of families, floral design gigs, and a couple of farmers markets we can actually staff without wrecking ourselves.

After that we would like to look something like the diversified Iowa farms we admire, the ones that are very intentional about what they do and what they refuse to do. Further out than that, who knows. It comes down to starting with the base business and layering onto it.

We would rather tell you exactly where we are than describe a farm we do not have yet.